Hey, welcome back to Day Six of our Un-challenge. In today's session, we're going to talk about cultivating true energy and why what we've been doing here, which is this slowing down, dropping back into stillness, unwinding patterns of tension, is actually the key to developing sustainable energy that can guide our life. Now it's true. If you just want to do a bunch of busy work or push yourself throughout the day, then, you know, take another cup of coffee, create a goal that you're kind of excited about, push through it, get to the end of the deadline and then, you know, collapse. And this is how many of us lead our lives.

Just get another cup of coffee, push through, and at the end of the day, kind of let go and repeat the process. But this isn't a pure, sustainable energy. It's not coming from our, what we could call, just our organic life force that's moving through us. It's a bit of a chemical assistance and even just the dopamine rush of creating a to-do list and trying to cross things off that to-do list, which can give us a little bit of excitement. But it's not this deeper wellspring of life moving through us that's motivating the next thing that we want to do.

So how do we actually connect to that? Well, this is where the slowing down comes in. Most of us are engaged in the mind's ideas of what we should be doing, where we should be going, what should happen next. As we've talked about in previous videos, a lot of these ideas are coming from outside forces - our parents' viewpoints, communities' viewpoints, culture's viewpoints, the media. And all of this creates an internalized sense of who we are and what we should be doing that we actually end up playing out scripts that don't actually have something to do with an alignment to who we are on a deeper level. Much of what we've been doing over the last five days has been learning to connect to that softer voice of truth within you.

Slowing down enough that you can actually be attuned to yourself and feel like what is, - what is mine and what is someone else's, what is in alignment and what is out of alignment. If we're not able to slow down enough to feel that feedback within us, then we are going to get swept away by the noise and the buzzing of our mind. And we're going to misconstrue maybe the excitement or the dopamine rush of creating a to-do list and having a cup of coffee to push us through it for an actual, genuine motivation for our life. So in today's meditation, what we're going to explore is continuing to deepen that connection with our body, because this information is happening through the body. It's not just thoughts.

Alignment feels a certain way in the body, a genuine joy that comes from feeling like we're doing what we should be doing right now. We're not overriding something. We're bringing our full self to the moment. There's an organic sense of fulfillment and joy that arises. And we feel that in the body.

Most of us are so caught in our heads that we're actually not attuned to that feedback as it's arising. So that's a training. This is embodiment work, it's embodiment practice, and it's a big aspect of mindfulness and meditation and other movement modalities. So in the meditation where we're going to do something specifically to get you more into your body. But my encouragement to you today, as you continue to integrate these ideas into your life, is to see if you can pay more attention to the feedback mechanisms in your body.

When there's an opportunity to do something, you have to make a decision, notice what that feels like for you. Do you feel tension? Do you feel fear? Or is there a sense of ease and being settled? And where do those things show up in your experience? Is it a tightness in your chest? In your belly? If there's ease, how does that show up for you? Are the shoulders more relaxed? All of these things are subtle, but often overlooked. And they are key to making sure that we're in alignment with a deeper sense of who we are and how we want to lead our lives. This is all part of the transition from going, from leading our life through the mind's activity and the buzzing and the noise to actually getting quiet enough, still enough to receive information as it's moving through us and then aligning ourselves with that. It's a big practice, but we've been doing this for a number of days.

You have the resources to continue. And today we'll go deeper into that embodiment work. Thanks for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.